The Onge language (also spelled ''Öñge'', ''Ongee, Eng,'' or ''Ung'') is one of two known

Ongan languages Ongan, also called Angan, South Andamanese or Jarawa–Onge, is a phylum of two Andamanese languages, Önge and Jarawa, spoken in the southern Andaman Islands. The two known extant languages are: * Önge or Onge ( transcribes ); 96 speakers ( ...

within the

Andaman Andaman may refer to: * Andaman Islands * Andaman Sea * ''Andaman'' (1998 film), a Kannada-language film * ''Andaman'' (2016 film), a Tamil-language film * ''Andaman'' (2021 film), a Hindi-language film See also * Andaman and Nicobar Islands ...

family. It is spoken by the

Onge The Onge (also Önge, Ongee, and Öñge) are an Andamanese ethnic group, indigenous to the Andaman Islands in Southeast Asia at the Bay of Bengal, currently administered by India. They are traditionally hunter-gatherers and fishers, but als ...

people in

Little Andaman Island Little Andaman Island (Onge: ''Gaubolambe'') is the fourth largest of the Andaman Islands of India with an area of 707 km2, lying at the southern end of the archipelago. It belongs to the South Andaman administrative district, part of the I ...

India India, officially the Republic of India (Hindi: ), is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by area, the second-most populous country, and the most populous democracy in the world. Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the so ...

History

In the 18th century the Onge were distributed across

and the nearby islands, with some territory and camps established on

Rutland Island Rutland Island is an island of the Andaman Islands. It belongs to the South Andaman administrative district, part of the Indian union territory of Andaman and Nicobar Islands. The island is located south from Port Blair. History The island u ...

and the southern tip of

South Andaman Island South Andaman Island is the southernmost island of the Great Andaman and is home to the majority of the population of the Andaman Islands. It belongs to the South Andaman administrative district, part of the Indian union territory of Andaman and ...

. Originally restive, they were pacified by M. V. Portman in the 1890s.George Weber,
the Tribes
'. Chapter 8 in

'. Accessed on 2012-07-03. By the end of the 19th century they sometimes visited the

South South is one of the cardinal directions or Points of the compass, compass points. The direction is the opposite of north and is perpendicular to both east and west. Etymology The word ''south'' comes from Old English ''sūþ'', from earlier Pro ...

and North Brother Islands to catch

sea turtle Sea turtles (superfamily Chelonioidea), sometimes called marine turtles, are reptiles of the order Testudines and of the suborder Cryptodira. The seven existing species of sea turtles are the flatback, green, hawksbill, leatherback, loggerhead, ...

s; at the time, those islands seemed to be the boundary between their territory and the range of the

Great Andamanese people The Great Andamanese are an indigenous people of the Great Andaman archipelago in the Andaman Islands. Historically, the Great Andamanese lived throughout the archipelago, and were divided into ten major tribes. Their distinct but closely relate ...

further north.M. V. Portman (1899),
A history of our Relations with the Andamanese
', Volume II. Office of the Government Printing, Calcutta, India. Today, the surviving members (less than 100) are confined to two reserve camps on Little Andaman, Dugong Creek in the northeast and South Bay. The Onge were semi-nomadic and fully dependent on

hunting and gathering A traditional hunter-gatherer or forager is a human living an ancestrally derived lifestyle in which most or all food is obtained by foraging, that is, by gathering food from local sources, especially edible wild plants but also insects, fungi, ...

for food. The Onge are one of the aboriginal peoples (

adivasi The Adivasi refers to inhabitants of Indian subcontinent, generally tribal people. The term is a Sanskrit word coined in the 1930s by political activists to give the tribal people an indigenous identity by claiming an indigenous origin. The term ...

) of India. Together with the other Andamanese tribes and a few other isolated groups elsewhere in

Oceania Oceania (, , ) is a region, geographical region that includes Australasia, Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia. Spanning the Eastern Hemisphere, Eastern and Western Hemisphere, Western hemispheres, Oceania is estimated to have a land area of ...

, they comprise the

Negrito The term Negrito () refers to several diverse ethnic groups who inhabit isolated parts of Southeast Asia and the Andaman Islands. Populations often described as Negrito include: the Andamanese peoples (including the Great Andamanese, the Onge, ...

peoples, believed to be remnants of a very early migration out of

Africa Africa is the world's second-largest and second-most populous continent, after Asia in both cases. At about 30.3 million km2 (11.7 million square miles) including adjacent islands, it covers 6% of Earth's total surface area ...

Status

Onge used to be spoken throughout Little Andaman as well as in smaller islands to the north - and possibly in the southern tip of

South Andaman South Andaman Island is the southernmost island of the Great Andaman and is home to the majority of the population of the Andaman Islands. It belongs to the South Andaman administrative district, part of the Indian union territory of Andaman an ...

island. Since the middle of the 19th century, with the arrival of the British in the

Andamans The Andaman Islands () are an archipelago in the northeastern Indian Ocean about southwest off the coasts of Myanmar's Ayeyarwady Region. Together with the Nicobar Islands to their south, the Andamans serve as a maritime boundary between the ...

, and, after Indian independence, the massive inflow of Indian settlers from the mainland, the number of Onge speakers has steadily declined, although a moderate increase has been observed in recent years. Currently, there are only 94 native speakers of Onge, confined to a single settlement in the northeast of Little Andaman island (see map below), making it an

endangered language An endangered language or moribund language is a language that is at risk of disappearing as its speakers die out or shift to speaking other languages. Language loss occurs when the language has no more native speakers and becomes a "dead langu ...

Demographic troubles

The Onge are one of the least fertile people in the world. About 40% of the married couples are sterile. Onge women rarely become pregnant before the age of 28. Infant and child mortality is in the range of 40%. The Onge's

net reproductive index In population ecology and demography, the net reproduction rate, ''R''0, is the average number of offspring (often specifically daughters) that would be born to a female if she passed through her lifetime conforming to the age-specific fertility ...

is 0.91.A. N. Sharma (2003),
Tribal Development in the Andaman Islands
', page 64. Sarup & Sons, New Delhi. The net reproductive index among the Great Andamanese is 1.40. A depiction of Onge people in Kolkata Museum

Population

Colors= id:lightgrey value:gray(0.9) id:darkgrey value:gray(0.8) id:sfondo value:rgb(1,1,1) id:barra value:rgb(0.6,0.7,0.8) ImageSize = width:455 height:303 PlotArea = left:50 bottom:50 top:30 right:30 DateFormat = x.y Period = from:0 till:800 TimeAxis = orientation:vertical AlignBars = justify ScaleMajor = gridcolor:darkgrey increment:300 start:0 ScaleMinor = gridcolor:lightgrey increment:150 start:0 BackgroundColors = canvas:sfondo BarData= bar:1901 text:1901 bar:1911 text:1911 bar:1921 text:1921 bar:1931 text:1931 bar:1951 text:1951 bar:1961 text:1961 bar:1971 text:1971 bar:1981 text:1981 bar:1991 text:1991 bar:2001 text:2001 bar:2011 text:2011 PlotData= color:barra width:20 align:left bar:1901 from: 0 till:672 bar:1911 from: 0 till:631 bar:1921 from: 0 till:346 bar:1931 from: 0 till:250 bar:1951 from: 0 till:150 bar:1961 from: 0 till:129 bar:1971 from: 0 till:112 bar:1981 from: 0 till:100 bar:1991 from: 0 till:101 bar:2001 from: 0 till:96 bar:2011 from: 0 till:101 PlotData= bar:1901 at:672 fontsize:XS text: 672 shift:(-8,5) bar:1911 at:631 fontsize:XS text: 631 shift:(-8,5) bar:1921 at:346 fontsize:XS text: 346 shift:(-8,5) bar:1931 at:250 fontsize:XS text: 250 shift:(-8,5) bar:1951 at:150 fontsize:XS text: 150 shift:(-8,5) bar:1961 at:129 fontsize:XS text: 129 shift:(-8,5) bar:1971 at:112 fontsize:XS text: 112 shift:(-8,5) bar:1981 at:100 fontsize:XS text: 100 shift:(-8,5) bar:1991 at:101 fontsize:XS text: 101 shift:(-8,5) bar:2001 at:96 fontsize:XS text: 96 shift:(-8,5) bar:2011 at:101 fontsize:XS text: 101 shift:(-8,5) TextData= fontsize:S pos:(20,20) text:Data from Indian Census

Phonology

Vowels

There is some

vowel harmony In phonology, vowel harmony is an Assimilation (linguistics), assimilatory process in which the vowels of a given domain – typically a phonological word – have to be members of the same natural class (thus "in harmony"). Vowel harmony is t ...

: 1p pl. prefix et- becomes t-when the vowel in the next syllable is /u/, e.g. ''et-eɟale'' 'our faces' but ''ot-oticule'' 'our heads'.

Consonants

/ʔ/? (c.f. Blevins (2007:161)) Blevins (2007:160-161) states that /c, ɟ/ are actually affricates, and that retroflexes may or may not be phonemic. /kʷ/ delabializes to /k/ before /u, o/. Phonemic /d/ surfaces as intervocalically, while arguably some words have phonemic /r/ which alternates with surface , l, j

Phonotactics

Words may be monosyllabic or longer, even in

content word Content words, in linguistics, are words that possess semantic content and contribute to the meaning of the sentence in which they occur. In a traditional approach, nouns were said to name objects and other entities, lexical verbs to indicate actio ...

s (unlike in the closely related

Jarawa Jarawa may refer to: * Jarawas (Andaman Islands), one of the indigenous peoples of the Andaman Islands ** Jarawa language (Andaman Islands) * Jarawa (Berber tribe), a Berber tribal confederacy that flourished in northwest Africa during the seventh ...

). Words may begin with consonants or vowels, and maximal syllables are of the form CVC. All Onge words end in vowels, except for imperatives, e.g. ''kaʔ'' 'give'. Consonant-final stems in Jarawa often have cognates with final ''e'' in Onge, e.g. Jarawa ''iŋ'', Onge ''iŋe'' 'water'; Jarawa ''inen'', Onge ''inene'' 'foreigner'; Jarawa ''dag'', Onge ''dage'' 'coconut'. Historically these vowels must have been excrescent, as nonetymological word-final e doesn't surface when number markers are suffixed, and the definite article (-''gi'' after etymological consonants, -''i'' after etymological vowels, due to lenition) appears as -''i'' after etymological ''e'' but as -''gi'' after excrescent ''e'', e.g. ''daŋe'' → ''daŋe-gi'' 'tree; dugout'; ''kue'' → ''kue-i'' 'pig'. NC clusters sometimes optionally reduce to single C, e.g. ~ 'to drink' (c.f. Jarawa ). Voiced obstruents may optionally nasalize in syllable onset when the coda is nasal, e.g. ''bone''/''mone'' 'resin, resin torch' (c.f. Jarawa ''pone'' 'resin, resin torch').

Morphophonemics

Clusters across morpheme boundaries simplify to homorganic sequences, including

geminate In phonetics and phonology, gemination (), or consonant lengthening (from Latin 'doubling', itself from ''gemini'' 'twins'), is an articulation of a consonant for a longer period of time than that of a singleton consonant. It is distinct from s ...

s, which may occur after word final -e drops, e.g. ''daŋe'' 'tree, dugout canoe' → ''dandena'' 'two canoes'; ''umuge'' 'pigeon' → ''umulle'' 'pigeons'.

References

Bibliography

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Onge language Agglutinative languages Critically endangered languages Languages of India Ongan languages